This is the question SAFER actually gets asked, usually by a school that wants to do something and does not know what.
The short answer
Not during the acute period. Probably not for some weeks. And not as a response to the death.
Why timing matters
Two things are true at once and they point in different directions.
Risk is elevated. The people around a suicide death are at increased risk, and identifying who is struggling has real value.
Contagion is a live concern, and a school-wide activity that asks every student detailed questions about suicidal thinking in the days after a death is an intervention with its own effects, delivered to a whole building at its most vulnerable.
In the acute period, postvention wins. Support the affected students, follow the district plan, and identify the highest-risk students through the crisis team rather than through a universal instrument.
Why not as a response
A screening run because a student died reframes the entire program.
Universal screening is prevention. Something you do in advance, on a schedule, whether or not anything has happened. A screening run three days after a death is understood by everybody in the building as a reaction, and it teaches students that the school asks how they are doing after somebody dies.
That is the opposite of what the program is for, and it makes the next scheduled screening harder rather than easier.
Find them early. Sit with them today. A screen that arrives after is not early.
What to do instead, in the acute period
- Follow the district plan. It exists for this.
- Identify affected students through the crisis team, through staff knowledge and through the friendship group, rather than through an instrument.
- Use the data you already have. A school that screened in the autumn already knows which students in that grade screened at risk. That is what care coordination is for, and it is available without asking anyone a single new question. See Module 9.1.
- Keep the Tier 2 groups running, and consider adding capacity. See Module 9.5.
Critical Reflection. If a death happened in your building next month, what would you already know about which students to worry about, and where is that written down? The honest answer to that question is a better argument for screening than anything else in this toolkit.
If a screening was already scheduled
Postpone it, and say why plainly. A screening scheduled for two weeks after a death will be experienced as a reaction whatever the calendar says.
Reschedule for a point when the school community has some footing, coordinate the timing with the crisis team rather than announcing it, and when it does run, run it as the ordinary scheduled thing it is.
When screening does come back
Bring it back on the schedule, not on the anniversary. A screening timed to the anniversary of a death is a reaction wearing a calendar's clothes.
# UNIT 12 – TRAINING AND CAPACITY
SAFER Universal Screening Toolkit. Four Modules.
The point of all of this is that eventually you do not need us.
